Here's a plabill for the production of Quo Vadis from which the costumes were filched.

{Playbill courtesy: josephhaworth.com}

A web site devoted to the acting career of the star of the production gives photos of the costumes here. The web site says: "Joseph Haworth played The New York Theatre in 1900, in the leading male role of 'Vinicius' in Quo Vadis. The spectacular production achieved a long run, and cemented Joe’s reputation as a bankable star of the Broadway theatre."Here's a publicity photo showing many of the costumes.

{The New York Theatre, built 1895, located on Broadway between 44th & 45th Streets; source: josephhaworth.com}

The author of the Haworth web pages says that the theater "opened as part of an entertainment complex called the Olympia, and marked the birth of a new theatre district in the Long Acre (Times) Square area. Hammerstein’s original idea was a palace of entertainment containing three theatres, a roof garden, billiard rooms, a bowling alley, a Turkish bath, cafes and restaurants. It was a project beset with difficulties, but ultimately two theatres opened in the building: The Lyric and The Music Hall. When Hammerstein sold the Olympia in 1899, The Lyric became the Criterion and The Music Hall became The New York Theatre."

Monday, August 23, 2010

This photo shows another street market on the east side, but this time the main subject isn't the crowd of buyers and sellers but rather the skyline of lower Manhattan. It's a Berenice Abbott kind of cityscape with a jumble of rectilinear forms fronting a haze of distant towering structures. The horse-drawn wagon in foreground attracts attention, but — being unfocused — doesn't arrest it.

{Caption: New York City, including the Lower East Side, from Manhattan Bridge, c1917, by the Detroit Publishing Co.; source: Library of Congress}

2. The tower on the left is the Singer Building of 1908, one of the city's first skyscrapers. On right is the Woolworth Building which opened in 1913 and which was, until 1930, the world's tallest building.

5. Unable to string clothes lines across an alleyway, residents are using the pole method to get things dry. I like the variety of window treatments you see in the facade that faces us: distinctive curtains, shades, and awnings. The American flag is a nice touch in this low-income immigrant neighborhood.

6. This is a mystery. The front part is set up to be drawn by a pair or two of horses, but whether it's a single contraption or six parked together I can't tell.

7. Here is the back half of the block, tenements shading the barrows and storefronts.

8. The front half is much the same. If I'm right, the street sign says "Market."

9. Here's our goods wagon with its white horses. Evidently the shop behind belongs to a barber, but is not now open.

I'm pretty sure the location is Monroe and Hamilton Streets, as shown in this extract from an atlas published the year before.

{Aerial view of lower manhattan looking southwest from east river july 1928; source: photo is available from various sources and can be found on flickr}

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In 1935, Berenice Abbott placed her camera two blocks west on Henry Street to capture two iconic towers. Though there are obvious differences in vantage and content, this photo is much like our photo. As did the anonymous Detroit Photographic cameraman, she selected a view point which creates a separation between middle distance and far. There's abundant, unseen space between the strongly-lit foreground space and the far-away buildings in hazy light. Both images also have converging diagonals and geometric blocks of dark/light to the right.

{Henry Street. November 29, 1935. Caption from Museum of the City of New York: "Just east of New York's civic center lay some of the city's oldest slums. Abbott made the most of this stark juxtaposition, showing the Municipal Building and the Woolworth Building rising above the old-law tenements of Henry Street. Monuments to civic pride and private enterprise, both skyscrapers were built on the eve of World War I. The Henry Street Settlement and the Jacob Riis Settlement House lie just outside the area depicted in the photograph. Ironically, the ancient tenements of Henry Street remain exactly as they did in Abbott's day, accommodating the overflow from Chinatown of recent Asian immigrants. The Woolworth and Municipal Building towers still rise up over the tenements, but they were dwarfed by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, completed in the 1970s. My source: wiredinnewyork}

Notice that Abbott's shot includes one of two turrets that you can also see in the Manhattan Bridge photo.

Here's another Abbott photo — one of my favorites — which shows the Manhattan end of the span of the Manhattan Bridge. Our unknown photographer place himself on the span to the right, our of our sight, and aimed his camera still further to our right.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

This postcard shows Eastern European Jewish immigrants on the lower east side of Manhattan just before 1900. Like Cliff Dwellers, the painting by George Bellows I showed the other day, it reveals the vibrancy of high-density urban neighborhoods and not, except by implication, the extreme hardships endured by the people who lived in them.

{Caption: New Jewish market on the East Side, New York, postcard by the Detroit Photographic Co. from a photo of 1900; source: Library of Congress}

Here is a copy with inscription from "Lizzie R."

{New Jewish Market On The East Side. Postmarked New York 1906. Source: ad on eBay}

As Jacob Riis had something to say about the content of the painting (though twenty years beforehand), so he had something to say about the street market (though this particular "New" market hadn't yet come into existence):

The crowds that jostle each other at the wagons and about the sidewalk shops, where a gutter plank on two ash-barrels does duty for a counter! Pushing, struggling, babbling, and shouting in foreign tongues, a veritable Babel of confusion. An English word falls upon the ear almost with a sense of shock, as something unexpected and strange. ... [Apart from pigs,] there is scarcely anything else that can be hawked from a wagon that is not to be found, and at ridiculously low prices. Bandannas and tin cups at two cents, peaches at a cent a quart, “damaged” eggs for a song, hats for a quarter, and spectacles, warranted to suit the eye, at the optician’s who has opened shop on a Hester Street door-step, for thirty five cents; frowzy-looking chickens and half-plucked geese, hung by the neck and protesting with wildly strutting feet even in death against the outrage, are the great staple of the market. ... Old coats are hawked for fifty cents, “as good as new.” ... The endless panorama of the tenements, rows upon rows, between stony streets, stretches to the north, to the south, and to the west as far as the eye reaches.[2]

I think the photo shows the south end of Elizabeth Street. The camera seems to be located just north of Bayard, aimed up toward Canal.

Canal St. is at the arrow point on this 1879 birds eye map. Division St. bears the elevated railway running east from Chatham Sq. and the E. Broadway of Cliff Dwellers is parallel to and just south of Division.

{The city of New York, by Will L. Taylor, 1879; source: Library of Congress}

Here's the original photo from which the photocrom was made.

{Caption: Jewish market on the East Side, New York, N.Y., by Detroit Publishing Co., taken between 1890 and 1901; source: Library of Congress}

The block contains mid-century wooden buildings with small brick structures and newer dumbbell tenements. Judging from the open windows and number of people in shirtsleeves, the day is warm, probably during one of the summer months.

If I'm right about its location, this market is only two blocks from the Italian street market on Mulberry St. Riis noted the similarities between the Jewish and Italian markets: "A common pulse beats in the quarters of the Polish Jews and in the Mulberry Bend, though they have little else in common. Life over yonder in fine weather is a perpetual holiday, here a veritable tread-mill of industry. Friday brings out all the latent color and picturesqueness of the Italians, as of these Semites. The crowds and the common poverty are the bonds of sympathy between them." Here's the Mulberry St. market in 1900. There's also a famous photocrom version of it.[4]{Mulberry St., New York, N.Y. c1900; Detroit Publishing Co.; source: Library of Congress}

Here are some detail views from the "Jewish Market" photo.

1. A woman watching out a window seems to be looking directly at us. The appears to have a pine tree; you can't tell what's being advertised. There's a high intensity electric lamp, a version of New York's first electric street lighting. Someone's apron has found its way to the top of the sheet metal awning.

2. The boy with hand on head catches my eye, then, to the left, the bearded guy with "boater" and open collar. The wrought iron gate just behind him is a bit of a mystery. Vendors would rent the barrows for twenty five cents a day. Two guys are having a discussion and one scratches his nose.

3. The kerchiefed woman on the left has soiled her apron and the woman with top knot in front of her seems to be bustling to get her shopping done. A vendor has sold almost all the potatoes on his cart. Two boys are looking at a woman's improvised countertop which displays books and bric a brac.

4. I think this is a meat wagon. The harness is more elaborate than normal on delivery wagons, possibly because the loads were heavy. Note the heart cutout at back.

8. The stall at left is selling pants. Riis said "Old coats are hawked for fifty cents, “as good as new,” and “pants” — there are no trousers in Jewtown, only pants — at anything that can be got. There is a knot of half a dozen “pants” pedlars in the middle of the street, twice as many men of their own race fingering their wares and plucking at the seams with the anxious scrutiny of would-be buyers, though none of them has the least idea of investing in a pair. Yes, stop! This baker, fresh from his trough, bare-headed and with bare arms, has made an offer: for this pair thirty cents; a dollar and forty was the price asked."

9. It can't be easy to keep up with the washing when your clothes line is so short.

10. Selling socks off an old baby carriage.

11. I wonder whether the boy is just observing or has been tasked with keeping the horse quiet.

12. A close-up of the nose gesture.

13. Selling ice.

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Notes:

[1] This card was almost certainly made using the photocrom method for converting black and white photographs to lithographic prints. From the 1880s and into the 20th century, this was the dominant method for making colored postcards and the Detroit Photographic Co. made thousands of them.

[2] Jewtown, by Jacob A. Riis, Chapter X of his book, How the Other Half Lives, (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890). As with Chapter XI, to which I drew attention the other day, this article is worth reading in full. Also, as I said then, Riis didn't mean to disparage Jews in using the term Jewtown, but intended it as we use the terms Chinatown and Little Italy.

[3] Canal Street got its name from a ditch used half a century before to drain Collect Pond. Once drained, the area that was Collect Pond became the notorious Five Points district. If you're interested, see my last blog for a list of posts I've done on Five Points. Elizabeth Street, like others I've mentioned, lies on the route my great-grandfather took between his home in Woodside, Queens, and his office on Reade Street. Known for his optimistic outlook and sense of humor, he once told of petty thefts he made at street markets like this back when, as a teenager, he first arrived in New York. In an interview that appeared in The Sun, June 30, 1906, he said that in 1854 he had stolen a tomato off a wagon in Vesey Street: "I was only a boy. I had just come to this country. I was a clerk in a grocery store on Vesey street. I was trying to be good and forget what had happened in Munster. But at the fatal moment a cart full of tomatoes stopped in front of the door. ... It was then I stole the tomato." (A sudden decline in family finances forced him to leave a prestigious high school in Munster. It's unclear what happened but, at age 18, he apparently moved in with an aunt and uncle and then emigrated to New York. Another reason for wishing to "forget what happened in Munster" was his participation in the radical rebellion of 1848 in that city and its outcome for him and the other rebels.)

[4] See my blog posts on the two: Mulberry Street 1900 and Mulberry Street, again. Although Riis refers to Mulberry Bend, the market was located somewhat to the north. The Bend is just visible three blocks south of the camera in the photo. Like his contemporaries, Riis refers to the Jewish refugees from the pogroms and poverty of the Eastern-European areas of the Russian Empire as Polish.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

{Cliff Dwellers, oil on canvas, 40 1/4 by 42 1/8 inches, currently hung in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; source: the web pages from last winter's exhibit called American Stories at the Metropolitan Museum of Art}

Bellows was known for his gritty scenes of working class life in New York. Associated with the realist artists of the Ashcan School, he, more than others, depicted the "crudity and chaos" of city life in the immigrant neighborhoods.[1] Although he was not known to flinch from depicting violence and raw emotion, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art points out that in Cliff Dwellers, he "offers a genial narrative:"

Bellows acknowledges that much life in the neighborhood was lived in the street or on stoops and fire escapes, as residents sought respite from dark, poorly ventilated, overcrowded apartments. Yet he minimizes hardship, using bright colors and showing children at play, laundry snapping in a passing breeze, and other cheerful details. While Jacob Riis made a disquieting photographic record of New York's slums about 1890 and social commentators urged tenement reform, Bellows offers a genial narrative. Like Basil March, a character in William Dean Howells's novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) who visited a tenement neighborhood, he seems to proclaim: 'I haven't seen a jollier crowd anywhere in New York.'[2]

Jacob Riis did not just photograph, but, in telling detail, described the awful conditions endured by these immigrant masses. From a text of his written two decades before, here's roughly the same scene: "Evening has worn into night as we take up our homeward journey through the streets, now no longer silent. The thousands of lighted windows in the tenements glow like dull red eyes in a huge stone wall. From every door multitudes of tired men and women pour forth for a half-hour’s rest in the open air before sleep closes the eyes weary with incessant working. Crowds of half-naked children tumble in the street and on the sidewalk, or doze fretfully on the stone steps. As we stop in front of a tenement to watch one of these groups, a dirty baby in a single brief garment — yet a sweet, human little baby despite its dirt and tatters — tumbles off the lowest step, rolls over once, clutches my leg with unconscious grip, and goes to sleep on the flagstones, its curly head pillowed on my boot." -- How the Other Half Lives, Jacob A. Riis, 1890.[3]

Here are some details from the Bellows painting.

1. The windowsill sports a flowering plant by which a young person looks out. A man takes a nap on the fire escape as another observes life going on below.

2. I think this shows a man lighting a cigarette. Tobacco was a luxury and young boys would scavenge for cigar butts, combining the remnants to sell. Guys like this would buy their tobacco and roll cigs.

3. The electric street car is on its way to Vesey Street, packed with commuters. We're on East Broadway and the sidewalks are jammed with other commuters afoot, as well as Riis's "multitudes of tired men and women [seeking] a half-hour’s rest in the open air before sleep closes the eyes weary with incessant working." The barber poll indicates that this block draws custom from places where men can afford a haircut and shave.

4. It's women who put out the wash to dry of course, doing so in the evening after they've finished work for the day.

5. Here are the romping kids to whom the Met curator drew our attention, but also one in exhausted sleep by the curb as Riis described.

6. An older girl has some harsh words for a boy, presumably her brother.

7. Two women, one with sleeping babe, relax in the pleasure of each other's company. If you're like me your eye was drawn first the white frocks of the girls directly above, and then to these two.

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The East Broadway of Cliff Dwellers was an area that Riis called Jewtown. The term seems offensive but he meant it as we say Chinatown or Little Italy. In a piece called The Sweaters of Jewtown, he both described and depicted the sweated labor of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.[4] Here's one of his photographs. It shows a tenement home and place of work. Note the girl's smile, the pet dog, and the hands-in-lap of a woman at rest, all of them mitigating the viewer's sense of outrage over the exploitive toil that's the photo's main subject. Riis says: "Up two flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage, of onions, of frying fish, on every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betraying what goes on within, ... in a dimly lighted room with a big red-hot stove to keep the pressing irons ready for use, is a family of man, wife, three children, and a boarder. 'Knee-pants' are made there .... Three cents and a half is all he clears, says the man, and lies probably out of at least two cents. The wife makes a dollar and a half finishing, the man about nine dollars at the machine. The boarder pays sixty-five cents a week. He is really only a lodger, getting his meals outside. The rent is two dollars and twenty-five cents a week, cost of living five dollars. Every floor has at least two, sometimes four, such shops."[5]

Riis says the these Jewish immigrants appear to present policy makers with an intractable set of problems. Organizations such as United Hebrew Charities try to better their living conditions and to break the economic system that ties them to poor-paying piecework, but they are stymied since there are so many Ostjüdin, eager to flee the desperate poverty and constant danger of life in the Russian Empire. As current residents move out, others, in greater numbers, move in. In tenements, says Riis, "the lodger of Jewtown can 'live like a lord,' as he says himself, for twenty-five cents a day, including the price of his bed, that ranges all the way from thirty to forty and fifty cents a week, and save money, no matter what his earnings."[6]

I've done sets of blog posts on the African-American underclass of former slaves in New York's Five Points neighborhood and on the destitute Irish immigrants who moved in with them.[7] After a bit of mid-century urban cleansing the Irish moved north to Mulberry Street and Little Italy and the African-Americans spread out to other neighborhoods, many of them to blocks east of Mulberry Street in and near Chinatown.[8] What Riis called Jewtown lay further to the east.

In 1890 Riis took this photo of the worst part of Mulberry Street, called Mulberry Bend. It's hard to tell from the photo, but destitution and crime were worse here than they were in Riis's Jewtown. From the shadows, it seems to be mid-day, a time on East Broadway when most residents would be inside making sweated garments; yet here there are many men out and about, most not seeming to have any occupation. The only woman we can see is stooped, collecting something from curbside.

This map shows East Broadway, Ludlow St., Mulberry St., and Vesey St. The blue line indicates the route of the Vesey St. electric car. I've also indicated Mulberry Bend and Reade St. My great-grandfather worked out of an office at 20 Reade St. for all of the second half of the 19th century and for most of that time commuted on foot from his home at Woodside in what was then rural Queens. He didn't usually pass through East Broadway, but he did cross its western end as he strolled back and forth each day.[9]

{The city of New York, by Will L. Taylor, 1879; source: Library of Congress}

In Cliff Dwellers, children play, vendors sell from carts, and a streetcar inches its way through the lively throng. (For more information about Cliff Dwellers, listen to the related Met Podcast episode with Joyce Mendelsohn and Annie Polland, two historians of New York’s Lower East Side.) Like Bellows’s painting, early-twentieth-century films of New York City streets often emphasized the sometimes chaotic movement of the crowds that passed before the lens. (As an example, see the 1903 film by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company called At the foot of the Flatiron, available through the Library of Congress website.) In Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910, the art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews writes that films and paintings in the early twentieth century often presented cities as living things. In Cliff Dwellers, with its emphasis on the surging, crisscrossing crowds, we see the streets of New York as a living being, which parallels the visual language of motion pictures.

[3] A photographer as well as sociologist and urban reformer, Riis was, like Bellows, associated with the Ashcan School.

[4] The piece is Chapter XI of How the Other Half Lives, Studies Among the Tenements of New York, by Jacob A. Riis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890)

[5] Here's the whole section:

Up two flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage, of onions, of frying fish, on every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betraying what goes on within, to the door that opens to admit the bundle and the man. A sweater, this, in a small way. Five men and a woman, two young girls, not fifteen, and a boy who says unasked that he is fifteen, and lies in saying it, are at the machines sewing knickerbockers, “kneepants” in the Ludlow Street dialect. The floor is littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on a couch of many dozens of “pants” ready for the finisher, a bare-legged baby with pinched face is asleep. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps him from rolling off on the floor. The faces, hands, and arms to the elbows of everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth on which they are working. The boy and the woman alone look up at our entrance. The girls shoot sidelong glances, but at a warning look from the man with the bundle they tread their machines more energetically than ever. The men do not appear to be aware even of the presence of a stranger.

They are “learners,” all of them, says the woman, who proves to be the wife of the boss, and have “come over” only a few weeks ago. She is disinclined to talk at first, but a few words in her own tongue from our guide set her fears, whatever they are, at rest, and she grows almost talkative. The learners work for week’s wages, she says. How much do they earn? She shrugs her shoulders with an expressive gesture. The workers themselves, asked in their own tongue, say indifferently, as though the question were of no interest: from two to five dollars. The children — there are four of them — are not old enough to work. The oldest is only six. They turn out one hundred and twenty dozen “knee-pants” a week, for which the manufacturer pays seventy cents a dozen. Five cents a dozen is the clear profit, but her own and her husband’s work brings the family earnings up to twenty-five dollars a week, when they have work all the time. But often half the time is put in looking for it. They work no longer than to nine o’clock at night, from daybreak. There are ten machines in the room; six are hired at two dollars a month. For the two shabby, smoke-begrimed rooms, one somewhat larger than ordinary, they pay twenty dollars a month. She does not complain, though “times are not what they were, and it costs a good deal to live.” Eight dollars a week for the family of six and two boarders. How do they do it? She laughs, as she goes over the bill of fare, at the silly question: Bread, fifteen cents a day, of milk two quarts a day at four cents a quart, one pound of meat for dinner at twelve cents, butter one pound a week at “eight cents a quarter of a pound.” Coffee, potatoes, and pickles complete the list. At the least calculation, probably, this sweater’s family hoards up thirty dollars a month, and in a few years will own a tenement somewhere and profit by the example set by their landlord in rent-collecting. It is the way the savings of Jewtown are universally invested, and with the natural talent of its people for commercial speculation the investment is enormously profitable.

On the next floor, in a dimly lighted room with a big red-hot stove to keep the pressing irons ready for use, is a family of man, wife, three children, and a boarder. “Knee-pants” are made there too, of a still lower grade. Three cents and a half is all he clears, says the man, and lies probably out of at least two cents. The wife makes a dollar and a half finishing, the man about nine dollars at the machine. The boarder pays sixty-five cents a week. He is really only a lodger, getting his meals outside. The rent is two dollars and twenty-five cents a week, cost of living five dollars. Every floor has at least two, sometimes four, such shops. Here is one with a young family for which life is bright with promise. Husband and wife work together; just now the latter, a comely young woman, is eating her dinner of dry bread and green pickles. Pickles are favorite food in Jewtown. They are filling, and keep the children from crying with hunger. Those who have stomachs like ostriches thrive in spite of them and grow strong—plain proof that they are good to eat. The rest? “Well, they die,” says our guide, dryly. No thought of untimely death comes to disturb this family with life all before it. In a few years the man will be a prosperous sweater. Already he employs an old man as ironer at three dollars a week, and a sweetfaced little Italian girl as finisher at a dollar and a half. She is twelve, she says, and can neither read nor write; will probably never learn. How should she? The family clears from ten to eleven dollars a week in brisk times, more than half of which goes into the bank.

A companion picture from across the hall. The man works on the machine for his sweater twelve hours a day, turning out three dozen “knee-pants,” for which he receives forty-two cents a dozen. The finisher who works with him gets ten, and the ironer eight cents a dozen; buttonholes are extra, at eight to ten cents a hundred. This operator has four children at his home in Stanton Street, none old enough to work, and a sick wife. His rent is twelve dollars a month; his wages for a hard week’s work less than eight dollars. Such as he, with their consuming desire for money thus smothered, recruit the ranks of the anarchists, won over by the promise of a general “divide;” and an enlightened public sentiment turns up its nose at the vicious foreigner for whose perverted notions there is no room in this land of plenty.

The tenement has defeated its benevolent purpose. In it the child works unchallenged from the day he is old enough to pull a thread. There is no such thing as a dinner hour; men and women eat while they work, and the “day” is lengthened at both ends far into the night. Factory hands take their work with them at the close of the lawful day to eke out their scanty earnings by working overtime at home. Little chance on this ground for the campaign of education that alone can bring the needed relief; small wonder that there are whole settlements on this East Side where English is practically an unknown tongue, though the people be both willing and anxious to learn. “When shall we find time to learn?” asked one of them of me once. I owe him the answer yet.

I know of a couple of restaurants at the lower end of Orchard Street that are favorite resorts for the Polish Jews, who remember the injunction that the ox that treadeth out the corn shall not be muzzled. Being neighbors, they are rivals of course, and cutting under. When I was last there one gave a dinner of soup, meat-stew, bread, pie, pickles, and a “schooner” of beer for thirteen cents; the other charged fifteen cents for a similar dinner, but with two schooners of beer and a cigar, or a cigarette, as the extra inducement. The two cents had won the day, however, and the thirteen-cent restaurant did such a thriving business that it was about to spread out into the adjoining store to accommodate the crowds of customers. At this rate the lodger of Jewtown can “live like a lord,” as he says himself, for twenty-five cents a day, including the price of his bed, that ranges all the way from thirty to forty and fifty cents a week, and save money, no matter what his earnings. He does it, too, so long as work is to be had at any price, and by the standard he sets up Jewtown must alide.

It has thousands upon thousands of lodgers who help to pay its extortionate rents. At night there is scarce a room in all the district that has not one or more of them, some above half a score, sleeping on cots, or on the floor. It is idle to speak of privacy in these “homes.” The term carries no more meaning with it than would a lecture on social ethics to an audience of Hottentots. The picture is not overdrawn. In fact, in presenting the home life of these people I have been at some pains to avoid the extreme of privation, taking the cases just as they came to hand on the safer middle-ground of average earnings. Yet even the direst apparent poverty in Jewtown, unless dependent on absolute lack of work, would, were the truth known, in nine cases out of ten have a silver lining in the shape of a margin in bank.

New York can “beat the world” on cheap clothing. A single Bowery firm last year sold fifteen thousand suits at $1.95 that averaged in cost $1.12 1/2. With the material at fifteen cents a yard, he said, children’s suits of assorted sizes can be sold at wholesale for seventy-five cents, and boys’ cape overcoats at the same price. They are the same conditions that have perplexed the committee of benevolent Hebrews in charge of Baron de Hirsch’s munificent gift of ten thousand dollars a month for the relief of the Jewish poor in New York. To find proper channels through which to pour this money so that it shall effect its purpose without pauperizing, and without perpetuating the problem it is sought to solve, by attracting still greater swarms, is indeed no easy task. Colonization has not in the past been a success with these people. The great mass of them are too gregarious to take kindly to farming, and their strong commercial instinct hampers the experiment. To herd them in model tenements, though it relieve the physical suffering in a measure, would be to treat a symptom of the disease rather than strike at its root, even if land could be got cheap enough where they gather to build on a sufficiently large scale to make the plan a success. Trade schools for manual training could hardly be made to reach the adults, who in addition would have to be supported for months while learning. For the young this device has proved most excellent under the wise management of the United Hebrew Charities, an organization that gathers to its work the best thought and effort of many of our most public-spirited citizens. One, or all, of these plans may be tried, probably will. I state but the misgivings as to the result of some of the practical minds that have busied themselves with the problem. Its keynote evidently is the ignorance of the immigrants. They must be taught the language of the country they have chosen as their home, as the first and most necessary step. Whatever may follow, that is essential, absolutely vital. That done, it may well be that the case in its new aspect will not be nearly so hard to deal with.

[7] Here's a list of the posts: This blog post is one of a series on the Five Points district of Manhattan. Here are others in the series.